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User blog:Pinkguy the b0ss/Banjo-Kazooie Review
What's up my Shreks, it's DiamondMinerStudios, and I'm here to review the game Banjo-Kazooie for the Nintendo 64, since I literally just beat it today. Without further ado, let's start off with a little history. In 1997, the company Rareware had been a second-party developer for Nintendo for three years. During this time, they put out the fantastic Donkey Kong Country trilogy on the SNES and had begun to develop for the console's successor, the N64, later to release Goldeneye 007, Diddy Kong Racing, and several more. Around the time of Donkey Kong Country 2's release, the same development team started development on an RPG named Dream, starring a boy named Edison. Little did the team know, but the project would change completely. When thinking of a companion for Edison, the team settled on a honey bear named Banjo who had a bird in his backpack. Sound familiar? Because those two would eventually become the main characters of the game once it was shifted to the Nintendo 64 due to hardware limitations of the SNES. By this time, the team saw the groundbreaking Super Mario 64, and decided to drastically change Dream into a collectathon platformer similar in style to it. What resulted was Banjo-Kazooie, the genre popularizer of the collectathon, and after several more changes to things such as the soundtrack and the aesthetics, was released to critical acclaim and significant commercial success, so much so that a sequel was put into development right after the first game's release (which I'll review eventually). So with that all out of the way, how do I think this game stacks up to Super Mario 64, Sunshine, or other collectathons? Is it a good game in its own right? Let's find out. Story The game's plot is fairly standard. The evil witch Gruntilda is upset once she sees Tooty, Banjo's sister, is the supposed prettiest girl in Spiral Mountain. In order to become the prettiest, she kidnaps Tooty and plans to use a machine to transfer her beauty to herself, and become the prettiest lady in all of Spiral Mountain. Like I said, nothing oscar-worthy, but not terrible in any particular way, so it gets a pass in my book. Gameplay You play as Banjo, obviously. He is joined by his best friend Kazooie, a red "breegul" who constantly insults characters besides Banjo (By the way, Kazooie is female. Is it weird that it took me nearly half a month to find that out?). Together, they must platform their way through nine different worlds in order to collect Jiggies and Notes, save Tooty, and defeat Gruntilda. One thing that this game has going for it is the fact that it's more of a "true" collectathon than Super Mario 64, or even Super Mario Sunshine. It has way more collectables, including but not limited to... Jiggies, notes, blue eggs, red feathers, gold feathers, secret moves, warp cauldrons, witch switches, jinjos, christmas presents, acorns, worms, mumbo tokens, stop n' swop eggs.... ...I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Since I personally love collectathon platformers, I think Banjo Kazooie's gameplay is top-notch. The controls are fantastic, the missions are challenging but not too unreasonable, the powerups (especially the turbo shoes) are tons of fun to use, and getting 100% completion is a rewarding experience, quite literally, since doing so gives you an extra health bar. If I had to nitpick a bit, the swimming controls aren't quite as good as both classic Mario collectathons, but they're still functional (especially after I found out that you can turn more sharply simply by holding the R button down while making a turn.... wish I would've known that sooner). The same can be said about the flying controls. The camera controls can also be a bit annoying. It uses the same camera scheme from SM64, with each press of the C-buttons moving it in large increments. However, the R-button adding in a system similar to Ocarina of Time's camera centering feature makes these camera controls a minor annoyance at worst. Just like SM64's camera, it's not nearly terrible enough to make the game unenjoyable, unplayable, or anything like that. Difficulty This game's difficulty is very well-designed, but it can spike on occasion. The thing that immediately comes to mind in that regard is the Rusty Bucket Bay propeller room, containing one of the game's hardest Jiggies - you have to hit two switches, and quickly make your way to the ship's propellers in order to obtain the Jiggy. Now I don't mean to brag, but... I actually got this Jiggy on my first try. No joke. Generally, though, the levels' difficulty increases just enough with each successive one, from Mumbo's Mountain to Click Clock Wood. Now on to the bosses. All of the stage bosses aren't too hard, especially Conga and the bees in Click Clock Wood. The final boss, on the other hand, is actually extremely challenging. Gruntilda relentlessly shoots fireballs at you, and you need to time egg shots very precisely in order to hit her and avoid taking damage. It's one of the hardest final bosses I've ever faced in a video game, and after about an hour and a metric fuck ton of swear words, blaming the game for my problems instead of my obvious lack of skill, and threatening to smash my cartridge (Which, what would that do? I swear my angry self is more irrational than most peoples'...), I finally activated the great Jinjonator, and with Gruntilda finally weakened and at its mercy, watched it pummel her in one of the most satisfying endings I have ever experienced in a video game. Now, there is one massive flaw in this game's difficulty I must bring up, one huge middle finger from the developers aimed straight at your face - Grunty's Furnace Fun. Oh and believe me, it's anything but fun. It's a huge game board where you have to answer questions in order to proceed through it. They are entirely determined by RNG, making this yet another luck-based shitshow. If you get a question wrong, you take damage. Eight hits, and it's back to the start of the entire thing. Sometimes, you'll encounter a death square, and in the case you get its question wrong, you die instantly and get sent back to the start of the board! WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?! (I really am becoming AVGN now, am I?) The only thing that makes this possible (for me at least) is a surprisingly simple glitch that allows you to skip a substantial portion of the board. You have to get up to a specific death square from the top, get into the top right corner as much as you can, and then answer the question wrong. If done correctly, the square will launch you, but instead of landing in the lava below, you'll just barely land on the board and will be able to skip over the rest of the game. The only side effect is that you won't be allowed to watch half of the end credits, which I don't honestly care about. Despite this, though, the difficulty of Banjo-Kazooie is not artificial at all (except Furnace Fun), and the game remains fair throughout. Soundtrack Oh my. This game's soundtrack is seriously, without a doubt, my favorite soundtrack of any N64 game. While SM64's was great, it reused a lot of tracks throughout each of its levels. Banjo-Kazooie, on the other hand, has a dedicated track for each main stage, several for each sub-area, and even Gruntilda's Lair has ten variations - a standard one, and nine to correspond with each level's entrance area. It even has some pretty memorable jingles, chief among them being the fanfare for when you obtain a Jiggy. Overall, Banjo-Kazooie's soundtrack is fantastic and perfectly compliments the gameplay. Graphics Wow, for an N64 game, these are some pretty impressive visuals. Sure, it was 1998 and Rare likely figured out how to produce visuals this great by then. But that doesn't change the fact that Banjo-Kazooie has graphics that have actually aged pretty well. I think it's the best-looking N64 game I've played so far. Each environment looks distinct, the colors are vibrant and numerous, and even the texture work still looks good by today's standards. The models may look dated (especially those of Mumbo and a few of the enemies), but again, this is a very minor knock against an otherwise great-looking game. Conclusion In conclusion, Banjo-Kazooie is a fantastic game, and is one that I wouldn't hesitate to reccomend to anyone. It's one of those essential games for the N64 that every owner of the system should have in their collection. Despite a few issues here and there, they are nothing that ruins the game. While I would still rather play either Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, or Spyro: Year of the Dragon, this game more than deserves the spot of my second-favorite N64 game and one of my favorite 3D platformers in general. With all of that said, see you later, my Shreks, and next time.... ...Well to be honest, I don't know what I'm going to do next. Possibly a NSMBW review, or even a return of an old series you forgot about (*cough* Fuck this Shit *cough*). Anyways, see you later guys. Category:Blog posts